An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

And the Oscars Go to….

Note:Due
to computer glitches that twice ate huge, unrecoverable chunks of drafts for
this entry, it is a day late.

Quick
quiz.What woman won more Academy Awards than any other?Meryl
Streep your say?Wrong.Katherine
Hepburn.Nope.Sally Field.Don’t be ridiculous.The woman with eight, count ‘em eight Oscars was not an actress at all but a
diminutive woman outfitted for decades in enormous round glasses, black Moe Howard bangs, tasteful two piece
suites, and a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Who
else but costume designer to the
stars Edith Head.

Edith Claire Posener was born on
October 28, 1897—although she would later claim 1902, a date which still shows
up in articles based on her Hollywood
press clippings—in San Bernardino, California.It was not a place she called home.Indeed she never had a real hometown.Her father, Max Posener, was a Jewish
Russian emigrant and her mother, Anna
E. Levy, was born in St. Louis,
Missouri, the daughter of German/Austrian
Jews.In the pecking order of Jewish
society in America, they were
mismatched.It is likely Anna’s parents disapproved
of the match and the couple eloped, or simply ran away since there is no
evidence they ever married.

Max
disappeared when Edith was small after a haberdashery
he managed to open in San Bernardino failed.A year later, in 1905 Anna married Frank Spare, a young Catholic engineer.They were soon passing Edith off as their
mutual daughter and she was raised a Catholic.Her stepfather’s profession made the
family virtual nomads has he found work in mining camps around the West.The family stayed longer in Searchlight, Nevada than most towns.

Frank
did earn a nice living an indulged his daughter in a first rate education.Edith graduated with a B.A. and honors in French from
the University of California at Berkley in 1919 and earned her Master’s in Romance Languages from Stanford
a year later.

Then
she was on her own in the world.She
started as a French teacher, first
in a parochial school in La Jolla and then at the Hollywood School for Girls, a prestigious
finishing school catering to the daughters of the booming movie business. In
order to qualify for higher pay, she volunteered to teach art as well as French despite
having no lessons in the subject since high school.

Edith
drawing skills were extremely limited so she enrolled for night classes at the Chouinard Art College.While there she met Charles Head, the brother of a classmate.They were married in the summer of 1923.It was not a particularly happy marriage and
the couple separated after a few years.They did not divorce, however until 1934, presumably because of Edith’s Catholicism.They had no children, but she gained the name
she used throughout her professional life.

In
1924, bored with the life of a house wife in search of a good income, Edith
naturally turned to the main local industry for work.Despite absolutely no experience in fashion
or design and still limited drafting skills, he applied to Paramount Pictures for work as a costume sketch artist under the
direction of studio designers.To get
the job she submitted a portfolio borrowed from another student. Not the last time she would finesse her career
by cutting corners here and there.

Head,
however, was a quick study.Her drawing
improved, and she began making suggestions.Within a year she was designing for her first picture, The
Wanderer, a Raoul Walsh film
starring German actress Greta Nissen and Wallace Berry.She soon
became a Walsh favorite, the first of several directors who championed her career.

At
first she toiled in the shadows of Paramount’s head designers, first Howard Greer, then Travis Banton both of who, as was the custom, would often claim her
work as their own for screen credits.It
was a “tradition” Head continued after she got the top job long after it was
both out of fashion and professionally frowned on, for which she would get a
lot of criticism from fellow designers.

But
within the studio, Heads work was championed not only by directors, but by
leading ladies who appreciated her habit of consulting with them on her design
to accommodate when possible their taste
and to accentuate their best features.Most designers took a take-it-or-leave it attitude with actresses except
for the handful of stars with real clout within the studio system.

Although
she had enjoyed some studio publicity over the years, Head did not attract wide
spread public attention until she put Dorothy
Lamour in that famous sarong in
1937’s John Ford epic The
Hurricane.The dress made Lamour
a star—Head kept her in versions of it in the subsequent Bring Crosby/Bob Hope road pictures—and Edith a celebrity.

When
Banton retired the following year, Head
finally ascended to the throne as Paramount chief designer.And she would keep an iron grip on the job
for 29 more years.

Paramount
was toward the rear of the pack of Hollywood Major Studios, much smaller than the relentless factory at MGM which produced as many as 200
pictures a year at its peak, or Warner
Bros.home of gritty urban dramas, “women’s
movies”, and prestige bio-flicks.In
either of those she would have had to compete with rafts of designers to get
the top assignments.Paramount, on the
other hand, made 20 or 30 features a year with a relatively thin stable of
stars.Head got her hand on any she
desired, and had time to frequently go on loan to other studios at the bequest
of stars or directors she had cultivated.By the 1940’s “Costumes by Edith Head” seemed a ubiquitous credit.

In
that decade she left her impression on many stars and memorable films including Paulette Goddard in Cat
and the Canary;Veronica Lake in
Sullivan’s
Travels and I Married a Witch; Barbara
Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Double
Indemnity; Ginger Rodgers in
Lady
in the Dark; Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious,
Loretta Young in The
Farmer’s Daughter; and Bette
Davis in June Bride.

Head’s
star was rising, but she was not about to let studio publicity departments
burry her contributions while hyping stars.She made herself available for interviews key entertainment
reporters and gossip columnists in
her debt by occasionally feeding them juicy—but never career damaging—studio gossip
and usually flattering bits on the stars she cultivated.She contributed fashion articles to magazines
and staged costume shows for newsreels.She even got Paramount to film a short
documentary on her and her department.

Not
that she was without critics, particularly among her fellow designers and those
who toiled in studio wardrobe departments.She had been an outspoken opponent of unionizationby costume designers.Always obsequious to authority, especially studio bosses, producers and
name directors, she could be a tyrant and taskmistress over the employees under
her, quick to shift blame for failures and to claim credit for their work.She defended the later by saying that their
designs were always only executed at her guidance, direction, and inspiration.

Others
were critical of her style, particularly in modern dress pictures calling her
the Shirtwaist Queen for her
frequent use of that basic style.But
shirtwaists are flattering on most women’s bodies.Moreover studio bosses were explicit that
designs be a “timeless” as possible, shunning passing fashion trends, so that
pictures could easily be re-released, a big money maker.The result was a classic clean but elegant
Edith Head style.

In
1949 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences added the costume design to its annual Oscar Awards. Beginning that year with The Emperor Waltz, a Bing
Crosby musical co-starring Joan Fontaine,
Head would be nominated for the next 19 consecutive years—sometimes for multiple pictures in a year—and five more
times after that with a total of 35 nominations.Her eight trips home with the trophy were for
The
Heiress with Julie Harris,
1950; Samson and Delilah with Heddy
Lamarr (color), 1951; All About Eve with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (black and white), 1951; A
Place in the Sun with Elizabeth
Taylor and Shelly Winters, 1952;
Roman
Holiday with Audrey Hepburn,
1954; Sabrina, again with Hepburn, 1954; The Facts of Life with Lucile Ball, 1960; and The
Sting in 1974.

Of
those films, the award for Sabrina was
the most controversial.For the key
sequences when Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter blossoms into a Paris model,
the star personally picked sketches by designer Hubert de Givenchy.The
outfits were constructed in Head’s wardrobe department and she did design most
of the “American” clothes.She refused
to give de Givenchy screen credit with her for design.Although the award was obviously mostly for
his contributions, Head accepted it anyway.

Head
was now a major celebrity in her own right.There were not yet famous American fashion houses, and outside of New York society hardly anyone knew the
name of a haute couture American designer.Only the great Paris fashion houses were known to the public.For many ordinary American women, the highly
visible Head was high fashion, not just costume design.Knock-off
manufacturers kept Main Street dress
shops across the country stocked with dresses and suits inspired by Head
movies.

Even
I, a pre-teen yahoo in Cheyenne, Wyoming
knew who Edith Head was.In those
days we had a full hour for lunch at school and those who could, walked home to
eat.I did.And everyday Mom had Art Linkletter’s House Party,
a kind of stone age talk/variety program, on the TV.Head made frequent, sometimes weekly, appearances
on the show, on the show, often dishing out fashion advice to members of the
audience.At home, Mom paid strict attention.

She
had now added Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock to her list of director champions and a galaxy of
stars including Hepburn, Taylor, Baxter, Grace
Kelly, and Natalie Wood as her devoted
fans.

Among
her other screen triumphs in the ‘50’s and ‘60s were Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson; Rear Window and It
Takes a Thief with Kelly; White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Crosby, and Danny
Kaye; The Man Who Knew too Much with Doris Day; the DeMille epic Ten Commandments; Witness for the
Prosecution with Marlene
Dietrich; Separate Tableswith Rita
Hayworth; Vertigo with Kim Novak;
and That
Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren.

Starting
in 1963 with Love With a Proper Stranger through The Last Married Couple in
America in 1980 Head made seven films with Wood.

Her
last film for Paramount was the gaudy melodrama The Oscar, for which she naturally
received another nomination for the statuette in 1967.Then Head left her longtime home at Paramount
and jumped to Universal, a studio on
the rise since its days as the home of classic monster movies.She followed Hitchcock there, the director
with whom she worked most often.

Age
and increasingly fragile health slowed her up some, but she could still pull
out some claims to glory.There were
five more Oscar nominations including nods for the musical Sweet Charity,the costume epic The Man Who Would Be King,
and the disaster movies Airport and Airport ’77.After years of gaining glory for
designing for beautiful Hollywood clothes horses, her final years were marked
by films centering on men, including her final Oscar win, The Sting.

She
also designed for Rooster Cogburn with John
Wayne and Katherine Hepburn.She also did work that evoked earlier
years of Hollywood glory and her own screen work—Gable and Lombard with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, W.C. Fields and Me with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine, and Steve
Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.The latter, released in 1981, captured the
look of ‘40’s film noir.Released
after her death, Martin dedicated the film to her.

Head’s
husband since 1940, set designer Wiard
Ihnen died in 1979 of prostate
cancer.The couple had no
children.Although Head continued to
work until the end, her health was bad.She suffered from myelofibrosis,
an incurable bone marrow disease.She died on October 24, 1981 four days
shy of her 84th birthday.She was buried
unostentatiously under a simple bronze plaque in a Catholic section of Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens removed from
the flashy graves and mausoleums of the stars she had decorated.